FRIDAY, JULY 31 , 2020. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A21
W
hat a tremendous burden it
must be for you to still be
defending President Trump.
You have called yourself a
constitutional conservative for decades,
but now you sit silently as the president
pushes to move this year’s election be-
cause he might lose. Even some Republi-
can senators are speaking up. Why aren’t
you?
Trump remembers how you ran inter-
ference for him when he claimed unlimit-
ed powers under Article II of the Constitu-
tion, so he thinks you will stay quiet.
Remember your silence after Charlottes-
ville? You eventually mustered the nerve
to claim Trump never preached moral
equivalence between torch-carrying Nazis
and protesters. How unthoughtful it was
of David Duke to expose you by praising
the president’s putrid performance and
thanking Trump for his “honesty and
courage to tell the truth.” The former Ku
Klux Klan grand wizard even bragged to
reporters that Charlottesville represented
a “turning point” for white nationalism.
“We are going to fulfill the promises of
Donald Trump,” Duke proclaimed. “That’s
why we voted for [him].”
Ouch. That one had to sting, but you
kept on defending Donald.
If you had a political soul after that
shameful stunt, the Cold Warrior in you
would have been as sickened by Trump’s
retreat from Germany as U.S. strategists
were over his ceding of Syria to Vladimir
Putin, handing Moscow a foothold in the
Middle East for the first time since 1973.
No country was a closer ally during the
Cold War than West Germany, and no
nation is more critical to Europe’s future
now than a unified Germany. Undermin-
ing the U.S.-German alliance because of
an ignorant misunderstanding of NATO’s
dues structure undermines the historic
work that Ronald Reagan and George
H.W. Bush completed throughout the
Cold War’s final years.
But there you are, silently supporting a
demagogue who sits by while intelli-
gence suggests Russia’s leader put boun-
ties on the heads of young American
troops. Trump instead plays Putin’s apol-
ogist by declaring the United States
equally guilty.
“Well, we supplied weapons when they
were fighting Russia, too,” Trump said of
our efforts to liberate Afghanistan from
the Soviet invasion some 40 years ago.
Did any part of you cringe when
Trump leaned once again on the crutch of
moral equivalency, ignoring the glaring
fact that the U.S.S.R. was America’s
sworn enemy during our “twilight strug-
gle” against communism? Maybe not.
Maybe Trump has you figured out and
knows what a frightened political soul
you are, and remembers that you re-
mained mute when he defended Putin’s
killing of journalists and political rivals
almost five years ago. “Our country does
plenty of killing also,” candidate Trump
told me when I repeatedly pressed him
on “Morning Joe” to criticize Putin’s
murderous ways. He wouldn’t then when
the victims were Russian reporters, and
he won’t now when the targets are young
American heroes in uniform.
I know Trump’s devotion to Putin
deeply disturbs you, but somehow you
swallow that bile and keep running cover
for them both. How hard it must have
been to keep all of that down when
Trump’s foreign policy adviser, national
security adviser, campaign chairman,
deputy campaign chairman, personal
lawyer, political consultant and attorney
general were all busted for lying to
federal investigators or Congress about
their contacts with Russians. But you still
kept your head down and marched in a
single formation behind Trump.
When it was revealed that Russia’s
interference in the 2016 campaign was
“sweeping and systematic,” you
shrugged your shoulders. You later
learned that Russian nationals with
connections to the Kremlin promised
Trump’s family dirt on Hillary Clinton,
and that they were excited to learn it was
part of “Russia and its government’s
support for Mr. Trump.” You remained
motionless, numb to it all, when federal
investigators later revealed that Russia’s
GRU began hacking Clinton-related
email accounts hours after Trump an-
nounced this: “Russia, if you’re listen-
ing, I hope you’re able to find the
30,000 emails that are missing.”
By this time, you began mindlessly
regurgitating the former reality TV host’s
propaganda about the “Russian hoax,”
and hoped Americans would be stupid
enough to ignore the mountains of
damning evidence against Trump. Your
singular focus turned to the Steele dos-
sier’s most lurid tales, and you believed
then, and now, that Christopher Steele’s
fantastical claims could erase a multi-
tude of Trump’s sins. You repeated the
lies of Attorney General William P. Barr
and South Carolina Sen. Lindsey O. Gra-
ham when they falsely claimed the FBI’s
investigation began with Steele’s dossier.
And you kept repeating this idiotic de-
fense even after it became painfully
evident that Trump’s team welcomed
Russia’s interference in American de-
mocracy and then tried to cover it up. You
still refuse to criticize the Trump team’s
use of material stolen by Russia during
the last month of the campaign, just like
you and your president continue turning
a blind eye to any Russian bounties.
None dare call it treason, but perhaps
one day they will.
[email protected]
JOE SCARBOROUGH
I feel bad for
you, Trump
defender
O
n Wednesday, Trump tweeted
what may be the most nakedly
racist appeal to White voters
that I’ve seen since the days of
segregationist state leaders such as
Alabama’s George Wallace and Geor-
gia’s Lester Maddox:
“I am happy to inform all of the
people living their Suburban Lifestyle
Dream that you will no longer be
bothered or financially hurt by having
low income housing built in your
neighborhood.... Your housing prices
will go up based on the market, and
crime will go down. I have rescinded
the Obama-Biden AFFH Rule. Enjoy!”
Many people probably don’t know
what the “Obama-Biden AFFH Rule”
is, but its roots are in the 1968 Fair
Housing Act, specifically its Affirma-
tively Furthering Fair Housing provi-
sion. That section of the law required
federal agencies that deal with hous-
ing and banking to pursue their mis-
sions in a way that would actively
desegregate housing. In 2015, the
Obama administration spelled out
how communities should measure
their progress, or lack thereof, in elimi-
nating housing bias, and tied federal
funding for housing and urban devel-
opment to those measurements.
Trump’s tweet is a promise not to
actively enforce that provision. And
it’s a message to White people they
can go ahead and do whatever they
feel is necessary to keep Black people
and Latinos from moving into their
neighborhoods.
Look at how he delivers that mes-
sage. He uses the words, and assumes
the context, of the era when the Fair
Housing Act was passed — a time of
“white flight” from the inner cities to
the suburbs. He uses “low income
housing” as not-so-coded language for
“housing occupied by people of color,”
and his meaning is clear. White Ameri-
cans, your property values would suf-
fer if an African American or Latino
family were to move in next door.
There would be more crime, because,
well, you know how those people are.
But don’t worry. Barack Obama want-
ed to make you let them in, but I’ll keep
them out.
At a moment when the Black Lives
Matter protests have sparked a debate
on how to eradicate systemic racism,
Trump vows to keep it alive.
This attack on desegregation should
come as no surprise. Trump’s first
appearance in the public eye came in
1973, when he, his father and their real
estate company were sued by the Jus-
tice Department for refusing to rent
apartments to African Americans.
Rather than quietly reach a settle-
ment, as other developers had done,
the Trumps filed a ridiculous $100 mil-
lion countersuit and accused the feder-
al government of forcing them to ac-
cept “welfare recipients” as tenants. In
the end, the Trumps agreed to a con-
sent decree in which they promised to
stop discriminating against minorities
without admitting they had been do-
ing so.
This racist mind-set about housing
is fully in keeping with the tenor of his
inflame-the-base reelection campaign,
in which he has demonized racial-
j ustice protesters as “anarchists” and
“agitators” while cheering, for exam-
ple, the White couple in St. Louis who
pointed guns at demonstrators march-
ing past.
Trump’s reflexively racist views
might not have changed over the years.
But the nation has.
For one thing, the suburbs are far
from lily-white. According to studies
by the Brookings Institution, the racial
demographics of America’s suburbs
now roughly mirror those of the nation
as a whole. In some metropolitan ar-
eas, more African Americans, Latinos
and Asian Americans are “living their
Suburban Lifestyle Dream” (as Trump
put it) than are living in the core cities.
At the same time, however, patterns
of racial segregation in housing per-
sist, including in many suburbs. Segre-
gation in housing leads to segregation
in schools, which helps perpetuate
structural disparities. The fact that a
given house in a White suburban
neighborhood tends to be assessed at a
higher value than an identical house in
a comparable African American neigh-
borhood helps maintain the massive
wealth gap between Black and White
people. A serious federal effort to “af-
firmatively” reduce segregation would
help lessen inequality.
Most Americans see this as a mo-
ment of racial reckoning, according to
polls. Trump has also fallen behind
with suburban voters, who have be-
come a key electoral bellwether. In
response, Trump promises his follow-
ers a return to the racial caste system
that stratified the nation before the
civil rights movement.
At least the president is up front
about all of this. The Republican Party
cannot pretend there is anything at
work here other than old-fashioned
racism. Those who support Trump’s
reelection must also support, and
cheer, his adamant refusal to enforce a
landmark piece of civil rights legisla-
tion. Enjoy!
Twitter: @Eugene_RobinsonEUGENE ROBINSONTrump
(again) uses
housing as a
racial wedge
O
ne president pinned it. The
other one nailed it.
It wasn’t enough for Presi-
dent Trump to tweet Thursday
morning, suggesting — albeit with a trio
of question marks — that the November
election be postponed “until people can
properly, securely and safely vote.”
No, Trump had to amplify his bla-
tantly overblown assessment that
“2020 will be the most INACCURATE &
FRAUDULENT Election in history,”
and his even more blatantly illegal
suggestion that voting be put off, by
making this his pinned tweet. And
there it stood Thursday at the top of his
Twitter profile for the president’s
84.3 million followers — a metaphorical
jab in the eye of democracy.
Of course Trump provoked to dis-
tract. His tweet landed just minutes
after news broke that the economy
contracted a stomach-churning 9.5 per-
cent during the second quarter of the
year, the largest such drop on record;
meanwhile, jobless claims hit 1.4 mil-
lion last week. There will be no V-
shaped recovery.
But to understand Trump’s motives
does nothing to lessen the outrageous-
ness of his suggestion. The law in-
structs, and history underlines: We do
not postpone presidential elections in
this country — certainly not by presi-
dential fiat. In any event, unless Trump
is reelected, the Constitution provides
that he will cease being president at
noon on Jan. 20.
The solution to the challenge of
conducting an election in the midst of a
pandemic, and with states potentially
unprepared to cope with the deluge of
mail-in ballots, is to take whatever steps
necessary, and provide whatever funds
might be needed, to ensure that as
many votes as possible are counted,
quickly and securely. Fanning the
flames of public doubt about the legiti-
macy of an election that he has not yet
lost may be among the most unpresi-
dential of Trump’s many unpresidential— indeed, unpatriotic — acts.
You could, perhaps, take some solace
in the fact that Trump’s fellow Republi-
cans popped his trial balloon — and
with astonishing rapidity, given their
ordinary cowering from any risk of
incurring presidential wrath. “Never in
the history of the country, through
wars, depressions and the Civil War,
have we ever not had a federally sched-
uled election on time, and we’ll find a
way to do that again this Nov. 3,” Senate
Majority Leader Mitch McConnell
(R-Ky.) told WNKY television in Bowl-
ing Green. “Never in the history of the
federal elections have we not held an
election, and we should go forward,”
said House Minority Leader Kevin Mc-
Carthy (R-Calif.).
Still, to feel grateful for such morsels
of resistance and sanity only under-
scores how little we have come to expect
of Republican lawmakers. It would be
too much, no doubt, to expect them to
expound on the dangers of Trump’s
efforts to undermine the legitimacy of
the election. But if they believe the
election should proceed, maybe they
could appropriate the money needed to
ensure it does so properly?
Apparently not. The coronavirus
package just released by Senate Repub-
licans includes no new funding — zero
— for state and local officials to hold
elections. “We’ve already appropriated
an awful lot of money for election
assistance,” McConnell sniffed, refer-
ring to the $400 million allocated to
election help in March. House Demo-
crats would provide an additional
$3.6 billion. If the situation is as dire as
their president suggests, you might
think Republicans could dig a little
deeper.
Trump’s actions would have been
troubling on any day — they were
especially despicable on this one, as
Rep. John Lewis, who risked his life to
secure the right to vote, was laid to rest.
Lewis’s funeral presented a poignant
contrast between Trump and his prede-cessor, Barack Obama, one that served
to diminish Trump even more.
Obama, eulogizing Lewis, used the
pulpit as the Democratic Georgia con-
gressman would have wanted: to argue
for renewed devotion to the work he
had left unfinished.
“We may no longer have to guess the
number of jelly beans in a jar in order to
cast a ballot,” Obama said, “but even as
we sit here, there are those in power
who are doing their darnedest to dis-
courage people from voting by closing
polling locations and targeting minori-
ties and students with restrictive ID
laws and attacking our voting rights
with surgical precision, even under-
mining the Postal Service in the run-up
to an election that’s going to be depen-
dent on mail-in ballots so people don’t
get sick.”
And so Obama ticked off a national
to-do list: First, revive the Voting Rights
Act, gutted by the Supreme Court, and
undo the “flood of laws designed specif-
ically to make voting harder,” laws that
represent “an attack on our democratic
freedoms” in their effort to suppress the
votes of a growing minority population.
Obama also called for automatic voter
registration; voting rights for released
felons; expanded early voting; a nation-
al holiday for Election Day; and repre-
sentation for the citizens of Puerto Rico
and the District of Columbia.
“And if all this takes eliminating the
filibuster, another Jim Crow relic, in
order to secure the God-given rights of
every American, then that’s what we
should do,” Obama said, a first for him
in public.
Trump’s name never crossed his lips;
Trump’s tweet went unmentioned. That
wasn’t needed. The comparison be-
tween the two presidents — one who
believes in perfecting the American
experiment, one who would do any-
thing necessary to undermine it in the
service of his self-interest — could not
have been more stark.
[email protected]RUTH MARCUSA presidential president
ALYSSA POINTER/REUTERS
Former president Barack Obama speaks during the funeral of Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.).BY MICHAEL WALDMAN
AND HAROLD EKEHP
resident Trump suggested Thurs-
day that the 2020 elections be
postponed. To be clear: Trump
does not have the power to re-
schedule voting. Election dates are set by
statute dating to 1845, and no U.S. presi-
dential election has ever been postponed.
Trump’s call for a delay is an outrageous
break with American faith in democracy.
This year won’t be the first time Ameri-
cans have voted amid disruption and
crisis. U.S. democracy has functioned
through wars and previous public health
emergencies, as history shows.
In November 1864, the Civil War still
raged, with hundreds of thousands dead
or wounded. President Abraham Lincoln
thought he was likely to lose the election to
former general George McClellan, who
proposed ending the war with slavery
intact. Lincoln was so gloomy about his
chances that he wrote a memo to his
Cabinet, to be unsealed only after Election
Day, that assumed he had lost. (He urged
his officials “to save the Union between the
election and the inauguration, as [his
opponent] will have secured his election
on such ground that he can not possibly
save it afterwards.”) Last-minute military
victories, especially the Army’s capture of
Atlanta, swung support toward Lincoln.
Voting was not easy, and circumstances
led to innovation. The first widespread use
of absentee ballots let Union soldiers vote,
providing Lincoln’s margin of victory.
Two days after his reelection, Lincoln
spoke to a crowd serenading him at the
White House. There were “emergencies,”
he noted. “But the election was a necessi-
ty,” he declared. “We can not have free
government without elections; and if the
rebellion could force us to forego, or
postpone a national election, it might
fairly claim to have already conquered
and ruined us.”That faith in democracy has been evi-
dent when Americans have voted during
other national emergencies.
In 1918, the influenza pandemic that
infected more than 1 in 4 Americans
intersected with Election Day. A second
wave emerged near Boston in September.
The campaign was intense: World War I
was still underway, some women were
voting for the first time, and “dry” candi-
dates were making a hard push for
prohibition.
Local and state authorities sought to
maintain the integrity of the election
while protecting public safety. Health
officials in D.C. decided to reopen church-
es, schools and theaters shortly before the
vote. In San Francisco, health officials
mandated in October that people wear
face masks while in public or in groups of
two or more. All poll workers and voters
were required to wear masks on Election
Day, prompting the San Francisco Chroni-
cle to call it “the first masked ballot ever
known in the history of America.” Still, “in
most places the election was held with
relatively few complications,” one study
later concluded.
During World War II, many voters were
overseas or away from home. In 1942, with
strong support from first lady Eleanor
Roosevelt, Congress passed the Soldier
Voting Act, allowing service members to
vote absentee in federal elections and
helping states send them ballots. This bill
was delayed by Southern opposition be-
cause it did not require soldiers, White or
Black, to pay the notorious poll tax. In
1944, Congress amended the Soldier Vot-
ing Act well ahead of voting, allowing
states to simplify the process. Eventually,
this legislation helped at least 2.6 million
soldiers cast ballots — enough to make a
difference in that year’s contentious presi-
dential election.
Decades later, fears were rampant
about a terrorist attack in 2004, the first
presidential election held after 9/11. Aterrorist attack in Madrid that spring was
seen as an effort to influence Spain’s
elections. The House of Representatives
made clear that U.S. voting would not be
delayed. By a vote of 419 to 2, it declared
that “the actions of terrorists will never
cause the date of any Presidential election
to be postponed,” and that “no single
individual or agency should be given the
authority to postpone the date of a Presi-
dential election.” Rep. Robert W. Ney
(R-Ohio) said, “Elections are postponed in
countries that have dictators by one indi-
vidual. We do not operate that way.”
Today, Congress can help ensure safe,
reliable elections by providing funds to
states to support significantly expanded
voting by mail, early voting and Election
Day polling. Already, Congress allocated
$400 million toward elections in the
Cares Act, but much more is needed. The
House-passed Heroes Act includes ample
aid, and it’s urgent that the next stimulus
include election support.
We also have to accept that this year, it
is likely to take days, not hours, to tally the
results.
Trump’s call for postponement, like
something out of an authoritarian hand-
book, aims to undermine confidence in
election results. Consider what a break
that is with presidents past: Lincoln
thought he would lose in 1864 yet carried
on. Woodrow Wilson and the Democrats
knew the 1918 vote could bring a setback,
as midterms often do. (Indeed, Republi-
cans won back the Congress.) In the 1940s,
the opposition party gained seats in each
election.
All of those votes were held. Americans
understood that regular elections, set by
statute and authorized by the Constitu-
tion, are at the heart of our democracy.Michael Waldman is the author of “The Fight to
Vote” and president of New York University’s
Brennan Center for Justice, where Harold Ekeh
is special assistant.A break with our faith in democracy